Missing an annual treat, new data, and surname distributions

This past weekend, I should have been away, at the annual conference of the Guild of One-Name Studies.  But, like so many other events, this has had to be postponed until next year, due to the current Coronavirus situation.  A "virtual AGM" was held - which I managed to miss (oops!)  Let's hope everyone keeps safe and well until next year, as it is always such fun (and educational, of course!) when we meet up for the weekend.

The current lovely weather has meant that my garden received more attention than my Study did over the past fortnight - apart from replying to a couple of queries, both of which involved the PARRY DNA Project, as well as genealogy, I haven't done any research at all!

But there's plenty to be done - these are the numbers of PARRYs in the databases that FindMyPast have added in the last two weeks:

FindMyPast Friday email dated 17 April 2020 

• Surrey Burials - 133
• Greater London Burial Index - 816
• United States Billion Graves Index - 1756
• Canada Billion Graves Cemetery Index - 123

FindMyPast Friday email dated 24 April 2020

• Kent Baptisms - 374
• Kent Marriages and Banns - 396
• Kent Burials - 379

Those will keep me busy (when I get around to looking into them 🙂 )

A recent query on the Guild's mailing list about the old "publicprofiler" surname distribution site resulted in this link to a current website being posted - https://gbnames.mappingdutchman.com/

It's always interesting to look at the results for PARRY on sites like this.  I know what I would expect, based on the data, but the picture presented can vary.  One of the nice things about this new site is that, rather than the limited date ranges of the previous, this one now includes results for most of the census years, as well as more recent data.  There's also a slider so you can easily follow the pattern of change over time.

For 1851, the earliest date, the map shows concentrations of the surname PARRY from Anglesey, across all of North Wales and into Lancashire, another concentration around the Herefordshire/Monmouthshire border area, a third in London, and a final, less concentrated, area around about Birmingham.

By 2016, the North Wales concentration centres more around Liverpool, the Herefordshire/Breconshire concentration has moved south, centering more on the Monmouthshire and Glamorganshire border area, the London concentration has expanded and the Birmingham concentration has both expanded and become more dense.

In various intervening years, the North Wales and Birmingham/West Midlands concentrations join up and then split apart again.

There are several factors to consider with regard to comparing distributions like this, such as how the data has been organised (eg by counties, administrative areas, or postcode areas), whether it shows total numbers, numbers as proportions of the general population, or as percentages of the total in that surname etc. and I haven't yet read all the details about the methodology used on this site.

But it reminded me of the work I did years ago, in 2005, on plotting distributions of the PARRY surname.

This was one of the series I produced from the census data, showing the actual numbers of PARRYs in each of the English and Welsh counties:

The distributions of PARRYs in censuses, per county, based on actual numbers per year.

And this is one of the maps produced during my attempt to plot a modern distribution of the PARRY surname, based on electoral roll data for 2002:

Point distribution of the PARRY surname in 2002, based on Post Towns

All of which reminds me that I really must deal with getting my old web pages back online, as there is so much fascinating information in them!

Beyond the Guild Blog Challenge

I am very grateful to Corinne for initiating the Guild Blog Challenge, and to Melody for setting up the associated Facebook Group, in order to encourage Guild members to start, or restart, blogging about their studies.  It was tough to get all my ten posts completed before the end of March, but I did manage it, thanks to a last minute dash at the end.

For many of us, the Challenge definitely served as a motivator and prompted us to stop putting off publishing information from our research.  And it is great that the Group will keep going, enabling anyone who hasn't yet completed the Challenge to do so, as well as encouraging us all to continue blogging.

The question for me, though, is exactly how to continue.

The Challenge reminded me of several 'conclusions' that I knew anyway, ie
1. That the Guild's main asset is the members, who are encouraging and supportive,
2. That words are not my forte - but that regular writing, and reviewing what I am going to post, does help to improve it. (well, I think it does - maybe any readers were just too polite to tell me what they really thought 🙂 )

The Challenge also highlighted some issues I need to improve on - for example, finding relevant photographs, or pictures, to illustrate a post.

Coming back to the study after a few years of very little planned research, the Challenge also helped to clarify what it is that I would like to achieve with the PARRY Study - which I have realised relates more to the 'bigger picture' about the data - frequencies, distributions, change rates etc - rather than the minutiae of individual family trees or stories.  Perhaps I shouldn't make such a confession but I don't (often) find other people's family history interesting.  I'm not a 'story' person.  Occasionally something might 'grab me' about a particular individual or family, but I have enough trouble keeping up with all the information on my own ancestors and their descendants, without trying to go into that much detail for all of the other PARRYs!   

There were definitely times over the last few months when I felt 'bogged down' by not getting something done on time - to the extent, at one point, I even considered deregistering the surname!  Examples of posts not completed include analysing the Norfolk records, which I'd extracted early on, also some records for Cumbria that had been mentioned as being on Family Search and which, like the Norfolk records, turned out to involve more than just a simple extraction task, because of the way the records are organised.

When I look back at my third post, "The state of the study. And some Norfolk records". and consider the extent to which the Study moved forward on those three 'big issues' over these months, I would have to answer, "it didn't."

Somewhere in there, is perhaps a hint about why some of us have problems with regular blogging, which is easiest to illustrate by comparing the difference between the impression given in WDYTYA! programmes and 'real research'.

Whenever the WDYTYA! series is on, with the celebrity walking into Registry Offices, or local Archives, and almost immediately coming out with the right piece of information to enable them to move on to the next stage of their journey, there is a chorus of comments from family historians that "real research isn't like that", that it takes time, and that sometimes hours of work produce very little reward (except the 'value' of negative searches, or course!  🙂)

The programme is designed to make a good story - and I think that's what I found myself trying to achieve with my posts.  So I ended up doing research in order to write a post (and which therefore has a need to be 'finished'), rather than writing a post as a result of the research I'm doing anyway (where it doesn't matter if the research isn't finished - such a post is still a record of how the study is progressing.)

So, moving forward, there's likely to be a change in the type of posts I write, with more of the "weekly update" style.  I think that's better than reducing the frequency of posts. 

Fundamentally, the PARRY Study blog has to encourage progress on the PARRY study.  If I happen to occasionally produce an interesting story as a result of that, that will be great - but I'm going to try not to let that become my focus, as it reduces the chances of me publishing anything!